Joints After Midnight & Rants

… and desktop web. And now with an emerging, multi-tasking layer of user command and control based on the simplest of interfaces: Text. Check out Prompt, which TechCrunch aptly called “a command line for the real world.” Prompt is about two things. First, integrations with useful mobile services — the chiclets. And second, a simple, social, text-like…

… Much of the Republican debates have been expendable theatrics, but I watched this weekend’s follies from South Carolina anyway. And one thing has struck me: The ads are starting to get better. This season’s debates have had the highest ratings of any recent Presidential race, and they’re attracting some serious corporate sponsorship. One spot…

… (image) A couple of weeks ago my wife and I were heading across the San Rafael bridge to downtown Oakland for a show at the Fox Theatre. As all Bay area drivers know, there’s a historically awful stretch of Interstate 80 along that route – a permanent traffic sh*t show. I considered taking San Pablo road, a major thoroughfare which parallels…

…I double took upon arriving at Medium just now, fingers flexed to write about semi-private data and hotel rooms (trust me, it’s gonna be great). But upon my arrival, I was greeted thusly: Now, I have no categorical beef with Facebook, I understand the value of its network as much as the next publisher. But it always struck me that Medium…

… President Obama’s final State of the Union address is currently trending on Medium, which is pretty much what you might expect given Medium is where the White House decided to release it (take that, Facebook! — though a piece about building Instagram has about twice as many recommendations, but I digress…). I watched the speech last night while…

… I just opened an email on my phone. It was from a fellow I don’t know, inviting me to an event I’d never heard of. Intrigued, I clicked on the fellow’s LinkedIn, which was part of his email signature. That link opened the LinkedIn app on my phone. In the fellow’s LI feed was another link, this one to a tweet he had mentioned in his feed…

… Here’s what I encountered when I, as a first time ever user, was directed to a document that lived in Office 365 World: Holy crap, Microsoft! I just wanted to read the document a colleague at another (much larger, older, and traditional) company had sent me. When this happens with Google, well, most of us have a Google account, so the link…

… Twelve years of making predictions doesn’t make writing them any easier, regardless of my relatively good showing in 2015. In fact, I briefly considered taking the year off – who am I to make predictions anyway? And so much has changed in the past few years – for me personally, and certainly for the industries to which I pay the most attention…

Image Credit Arch Cape Inn So I had a thought about the state of the publishing world, specifically that part of it that we’d call blogging(1). And it struck me. Why haven’t we made our own Medium? No, wait, that doesn’t quite sound right. Medium is awesome, and in fact I am writing this post in (on?!) Medium.

… (Cross posted to LI and Medium. Cuz that’s how we roll these days) If you’ve never blown it big time using email — you will. I have several times — in fact, I just did it earlier this evening. And gaaaah!, I wish technology had an answer for the clear and present danger that is myself, rushing through an afternoon, trying to GSD and hit inbox…

… that drives such a shift? What is the Uber or Facebook or iPhone that will drive this shift in data use behavior? God, if I knew that…I’d start that company. But I sense when it does break out (and I am certain it will), it will seem hugely obvious. How frustrating to not know what it is. Like a vivid dream lost seconds after waking, it haunts me every day. Any ideas?! …

…. Fifteen or so years ago, Google was a small firm struggling to create a scaffolding around the Internet that allowed it to scale its search product. In order to do so, it landed on a insane-sounding solution: Take a copy of the entire world wide web and place it in computer memory across Google’s own infrastructure. By the year 2000, Google was seeing…

… The view from Bolinas It’s been so long since I’ve written here, and I’ve missed it terribly. As startups tend to do, NewCo has taken over most of my waking hours. So I thought I’d just sit and write for a spell, even if what comes out isn’t fully baked. I’m on vacation in Bolinas, an intentionally scruffy sidebar of a town 25 miles north of San…

… with, and the highs and the lows mirror our own struggles with company creation, capital raising, and team and product building. For the first time, the Valley has a show worthy of its cultural throw weight. And that makes us all feel a bit more understood, and a little more validated. I’m looking forward to Season Three. I hope the guys all move to the city in this next chapter…because that’s where the story is heading after all, right? …

…, not so much with iOS but…). Really, Facebook is just another channel — like when Borders and Barnes & Noble consolidated the newsstand business. Facebook’s just a big newsstand where we have to have our product. We’re going to be among the initial few to do this, which gives us first mover’s advantage, and probably the best economics…